Dear Cornerstone Family,
Before you know it, the Lenten season will be here! We’re less than two weeks away from Ash Wednesday (March 2), the official beginning of the season. For those of you who are new to Cornerstone or at least to the notion of a church calendar, you may be saying to yourself, “Lent? What is that?” If that’s you, you’re among friends.
There are seasons of the church calendar we know like the back of our hand––Christmas and Easter for instance. Protestants and Catholics of all stripes celebrate those high holy days, and even the world at large acknowledges them. But Lent? Not so much. Many of us don’t have a reference point for Lent. Others of us have reference points that have left us confused or even concerned about keeping Lent. So, as we prepare to enter this season together, it’s appropriate to ask the question, “What is Lent?”
The word Lent comes from the Anglo-Saxon term for “length.” It’s a word used with reference to springtime; the time of year when the shorter days of winter “lengthen” toward spring. Lent begins during the cold and dreary days of winter, but by the end of the forty days of Lent, the obvious signs of spring and new life are evident all around us. The dark, empty, deadness of winter giving way to the light, fullness, and life of spring is the story Lent tells. Lent plunges us into the cross-to-empty-tomb gospel. It personally invites us to keep pace with Jesus, walking the wintery path of the cross into the spring of resurrection hope.
Just as Jesus endured the cross for the joy set before him (Hebrews 12:2), the Lenten season calls us to consider in a concentrated way what it means for us to take up the cross daily and follow Jesus Christ (Matthew 16:24-26). In keeping with the pattern of Jesus’s forty days in the wilderness, Lent is a forty-day season marked by fasting, prayer, and spiritual preparation. In other words, Lent provides us an opportunity, liturgically speaking, to do a spiritual spring cleaning. To purge the closets of our heart and reorder our lives according to the gospel.
I’m particularly excited this year about a particular tool towards reordering our lives with a special edition Cornerstone Lenten devotional entitled, Earnestly I Seek You. This beautifully designed devotional offers daily prayer services with unique devotional reflections written by Cornerstone members. I can’t wait to get my hands on one! The devotional is at the printer now. It will be available next week, Lord willing. Be on the lookout for it next Sunday!
Finally, Midweek at Cornerstone is back on March 2! I’m looking forward to our evening fellowship meals, children’s and youth programs, and a brand-new Vespers teaching series. This year’s Vespers series, Longing for God, centers on key spiritual topics from some of church history’s most influential thinkers. Please make plans now to join us all six weeks!
Longing for God
March 2—Bernard of Clairvaux: The Desire for God
March 9—John Calvin: Knowing God and Yourself
March 16—Henry Scougal: The Life of God in the Soul of Man
March 23—Thomas a Kempis: The Imitation of Jesus Christ
March 30—Martin Luther: The Freedom of the Christian
April 6—John Bunyan: The Pilgrim Path
Your servant,
